An Infinite Mind
by Auditory Eden
Summary: It wasn't the tapping that had woken her.


Author: Auditory Eden

Rating: T

Warnings: Dark, dark, dark, and did I mention the dark?

Notes: There is some speculation here, minor, that concerns the episode that's airing tonight. It may be right. It may be wrong. I don't really care. And I hope it doesn't bother you either.

An Infinite Mind

It wasn't the incessant tapping that woke her—a dreadful thirst sent her groping for her water glass in the wee hours of the morning—but as she set the glass down again with a soft clink, the sound caught her ear and she froze to listen.

A hand on the other side of her bedroom wall was drumming its fingers rhythmically against the shared wall, and, when she was so still and quiet her ears began to ring with the silence, the soft tones of a keening voice murmured. It was no mystery to to whose hand it was, or whose voice.

She'd been living with Daniel for almost two months now, following the disaster with his disturbed ex-student framing him for the murders the student had committed, helping Max around the house and keeping Daniel company when he tried to shut himself away from the world. She'd come over one night to check on him and just never left. They'd finally moved her things in when Daniel had said that Toby would only get fed regularly if he came to live at the house.

"Plus, there's a bit of a yard here," he'd mused aloud, some hours later. "He could be an outdoor kitty."

It had been those words that convinced her that she was truly wanted there. Now she slept in what had been the spare room, next to Daniel's. Lewicki slept across the hall, in the large room that overlooked the road.

Still listening, frozen, she tried and failed to discern words in the modulated sing-song whisper that played behind the steady thumping of fingertips on drywall. Finally the muted whimper broke through the sleep fog that clouded her brain, and drove her out of bed, to her feet. She swore under her breath as her toes encountered the floor. The wood was freezing, and the cold air stung her bare legs. The keening sound continued, and with a worried glance to her wall, she pulled the quilt off the bed and cocooned herself inside it, creeping towards the door and slipping out into the hall.

The hall was even colder than her room, and Kate hurried in the near-total dark to the door three feet from her own. From here the muttering, the tapping, were totally inaudible, and she breathed deeply, closing her eyes against the stab of icy air, before she gently turned the doorhandle and eased into Daniel's room.

The first thing that was evident to her was the blackness, and the second thing was the unsettling music of Daniel's words and fingers. The third was that, sitting in the cold and dark, nearly a yard away from his bed, Daniel was crouched against the wall, left ear and right palm laid level with one another on the surface as he drummed and spoke to himself. In the dim light Kate could make out the lines where a t-shirt's sleeves and collar fell on him, and she realized with a start that he had no real protection against the cold.

It didn't occur to her to try and warn him she was there. Moving quickly, she crossed the room and knelt behind the huddled mass of a man, letting her blanket cape spread into wings to envelope him as she wound her arms around his shoulders. He started violently, and she hushed him, rising on her knees to hold him close, like a child.

For a moment he sat in silence, tensed like a rubber band stretched to the breaking point, before he comprehended who it was wrapped around him.

"Kate..." His voice was deeper than usual, ragged, exhausted.

"I heard you talking," she told him, hugging him, stroking a hand over his shoulder as comfortingly as she could. Even through the fabric of his t-shirt, his skin was freezing. "How long have you been sitting like this?" she asked, not really expecting a reply.

As she'd thought, he didn't answer, merely balling closer in on himself and shivering a little. Something about the way he turned his head away from the room puzzled her, a little tilt, as though to prevent a sound from reaching his ears.

She realized why he'd been tap-tap-tapping away.

"Who's here, Daniel?" she asked instead, shifting her body to put herself between him and his room.

No answer. The fingers kept beating against the wall, his eyes squeezed shut, and his neck strained a little as though he were shaking his head. "Daniel," Kate said, more insistently this time, "Who's here?"

He did finally reply, but it was in a whimpering undertone, "No one, no one, no one's here...no one's here..." He sounded like a child, repeating words again and again to try and convince themselves that it was true. The low whine scraped against Kate's nerves like the sound of a dog being beaten, a rasp.

"Daniel—"

"Go away!" he groaned, tucking his head down onto his chest his hands coming up to cover his ears. "Leave me alone..."

Kate watched him with eyes wide and angry tears threatening to spill over, her arms still trying to hold him to her while he shrank away.

"You want me to go?" she asked, trying hard not to let the swollen pain in her throat distort her voice, trying to keep her tone as gentle as she might with a child. Trying not to let him hear her fear and her frustration, the frustration that was tearing at her heart as her knees went numb from the cold, hard floor, and this man in her arms suffered alone in his head. "Daniel, should I go?"

A wild eye turned to her, peering from between his fingers, a brown iris ringed with frantic white, like a terrified animal, and it stared at her as though it had never seen her before. She had never, ever seen him like this before, so tormented by the creatures of his own infinite mind that it drove him out of it, leaving his body the broken, primal shell of fear that she cradled. This was insanity on a level she'd never even contemplated. He seemed so very calm, so content with his life of puzzles and academia. She'd never considered that the shadows under his eyes were carved there by terror. But terror was what stared out of his partially obscured face, terror and fear. God only knew what it was he was seeing, what that apparition was telling him.

"Kate," he said again, more of a question this time, and she tried to catch hold of the slight lucid moment with both hands. "Daniel," she told him, practically cooing, trying so hard not to show him her fear, "Daniel, it's okay. You're okay. There's no one there, we're alone."

Some of the panic left his eyes, to be replaced with pain. He shook his head and closed his eyes, but didn't return to his fetal position.

Kate glanced behind her—sometimes he wasn't hallucinating, even when he thought he was, so best check—but the room was still dark and cold and empty. "Daniel, listen," she tried again. "There's no one here. Listen to me, listen to my voice."

His eyes opened again and the look he gave her was miserable, desperate. _Please,_ he seemed to be saying, _please make it go away._

Kate had pretty much always been of the opinion that children were cute from a distance and up close they were needy little bastards. Taking psychology in college had taught her that babies were basically tiny little sociopaths and that any normalcy they might or might not gain from there was a product of having society's constructs foisted on to them. She admired other people's children, played with her cousin's baby daughter, but she'd never had a child cling to her. She'd never experienced a particularly maternal feeling in her life; that was part of why she and Donny had ended so poorly. Now, though, a grown man turned to her and buried his face in her neck as he wound his arms around her as her arms held him, and she found herself faced with a rush of desire. The desire to comfort, the desire to make him better, to take away the fear and pain.

He could still hear whoever it was that was there, talking to him, probably taunting him, and Kate grasped at straws trying to think how to drown out the voice she couldn't hear. Her mouth opened to speak, but she couldn't make a sound come out, and she sat, frozen, for a moment. Then some little fragment of her brain kicked in and she began to recite the parts of the brain, her tongue and teeth and throat making the words while she stared at the white wall and stroked his hair.

She wasn't cold anymore. "Rhombencephalon," she heard herself say, "Myelencephalon, medulla oblongata, metencephalon. Pons, paramedian pontine reticular formation, cerebellum. Mesencephalon. Tectum, tegmentum, mesencephalic duct, cerebral peduncle and pretectum. Prosencephalon, diencephalon, epithalamus, thalamus, metathalamus, hypothalamus, subthalamus, pituitary gland, telencephalon, hippocampus, uh, rhinencephalon, the..." she trailed away as her memory failed her, but Daniel wasn't shaking so hard, wasn't clinging so tightly, so she moved on, trying to remember a poem she'd read once.

"Tiger, tiger burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry," she recited, but more than that she didn't know, and Daniel didn't pick up the next lines, though she thought he knew them. Lost for inspiration, Kate cradled him and hummed tunelessly, tucking the blanket closer around them, trying to give with her hands and warmth what comfort she couldn't give with her words. The hardwood floor dug into her knees and hip, where she'd twisted to meet Daniel halfway in the embrace they now held. Long, long moments passed, and finally she asked him, "Are they still there?"

His head dug into her shoulder by way of a nod, and she sighed quietly. "Daniel, just tell me who it is?" she coaxed, and he shook his head again, resisting. "Why not?"

His voice was muffled when he spoke, but they were the first real words he'd spoken that night, apart from her name. "I don't know his name. I can't remember."

"Who's name?" she asked, the knee-jerk reaction, but then she stopped herself. "Sorry, no, stupid question. Do you know...is he someone from the FBI? From work?"

"Issussand."

"What?"

His voice was much quieter now, though clearer. "It's your husband. You showed me a picture and now my brain's made him real."

Donny? Why in the world would he see Donny? He didn't know much about him, certainly not enough for him to create a copy of him inside his own head. She'd only shown him their wedding picture once, for a brief moment as she was packing it away two months ago. Besides, what on earth would a fictional Donny want to tell him?

These, she realized, were ridiculous questions to ask about the brain of a schizophrenic. Donny could be giving him a weather report, for all she knew, but the way whatever his hallucination wasSS saying made him react told her that it wasn't that. And he'd said before that his brain frequently made characters to personify things that were bothering him, which was why his case hallucinations were usually so distinct. They had specific purposes, after a fashion.

So again, why Donny? An idea lurked around the edges of her mind, but without the words to put to it.

"What's he saying, Daniel," she asked. She felt it against her shoulder as his brow furrowed.

His voice halted as he told her, "Just...things."

So it was about her. That was the only reason he'd be so very evasive, a man who hated to fudge the truth for any reason. It was probably embarrassing and it was about her.

"Is he talking about me?" She of all people knew Daniel well enough by now to know that no gentle line of questioning would get him to spill the truth.

His silence was answer enough.

She hissed as she shifted, trying to get in a position where she could make Daniel look her in the face, and the prickles of pins and needles stabbed her as she moved. That alone was enough to make him lift his head, it turned out, and though his face was still mostly obscured by the darkness of the room, she could see the concern in his features. She caught his face in her hands before he could duck back into hiding, and his eyes stood out in the dark as he stared at her, still a hint of the terrified creature in his gaze. The non-existent Donny must be standing right behind her, for he glanced to a point just above her right shoulder in flickering starts.

"What ever he's saying," she started, in a calm, soothing voice, but Daniel wasn't really listening, so she snapped her fingers under his nose. His focus returned, Kate went on, "Whatever he's saying, Daniel, it isn't true."

"How would you know?" he croaked at her, and she frowned.

"You've told me a thing or two about your schizophrenia in the past two months," she reminded him. "And what's your hallucinations' favorite thing to do, besides help you solve cases? Beat up on you. You see people that belittle you and tell you that you're stupid or inadequate. So I might not know what he's telling you, word for word, but I know that it _isn't _true." She could feel her face bending into a belligerent little frown, though she tried to smooth it away.

Daniel was silent, clearly unwilling to believe her, too entrenched in his own self-hatred to acknowledge that another person thought him worthwhile, but something about her words or her face brought a little smile to his face, and Kate, frown deepening, demanded, "What?"

As if to balance her expression, his smile widened, his teeth glinting a little in the light from the cracked curtain.

"What?" she asked, more insistently, and he shook his head, smiling helplessly. "Nothing," he told her, "It's not important."

She sighed at him, glaring from under her frown, and she narrowed her eyes at him, where he was still trapped between her hands.

He looked back, calm and once more in control of himself, but her eyes still played the image in front of her, of his fear and the way he'd cowered in her arms. Something told her she'd never forget it, the same way she'd never forget the moment when Daniel had told her about his illness. Some part of her would always want to protect him from that irrational fear of himself. Her frown faded as she sighed again, and gently, she kissed his forehead, his cheek, and for the length of a whisper, she kissed his lips, pulling away and letting him go.

Ever so slowly, Daniel's arms fell from where they had held her, like a ship pulling up its anchor, and an oddness interposed itself, a sense that they no longer knew each other. The floor, an irritation both had forgotten, was suddenly very hard and very uncomfortable. The blanket cocoon was restricting movement with all the dedication of a straight jacket, and Kate was abruptly aware that she was perched half on one of Daniel's thighs, her own ankle grinding into the floor.

They stared at each other for a long moment, and then Kate tried to move and yelped as her foot, trapped as it was, spasmed pain. The distance disappeared, and the weird, surreal quality that had haunted them before that, and Daniel started to get to his feet, pulling Kate up with him. Her feet didn't relish the cold floor, but Daniel seemed mercifully to have returned to his normal self, a little distracted, a little self-deprecating, but with a sense of confidence and assurance that made him so attractive.

It was still dark in the room, but Daniel guided Kate unerringly towards the bed, sat her down. "Which ankle did you hurt?" he asked, and then picked up her left foot in his hands. "Wiggle your toes," he ordered her. "Can you move your foot? Can you rotate it?"

His hands were very, very warm against her skin, and Kate quelled the reaction that gave her—the reaction his touch had always given her, from the very first brushing of fingers when he handed back a draft of her midterm paper, all the way back when she was eighteen. Finally he straightened, a shadow with indistinct features, and settled himself sitting next to her.

"I'm sorry," he told her, voice gone rough again. It took a long, painful moment for her to remember why he might think he needed to apologize, and she shook her head in denial.

"There's nothing for you to be sorry for," she told him, and he pressed her hand for a moment.

The inside of her was still wobbly from fear for him, and the anguish of seeing her friend, probably her best friend, if she thought about it, in such a terrible place, so some part of her that she normally kept locked up asked him, "Can I stay here for tonight?"

A silence, a moment when her heart was hammering so hard she thought she'd die, when anxiety and embarrassment near strangled her, and her face burned in the dark, but then he replied, "Of course."

Tucked back into a bed, the tapping gone, and the man who'd been doing it already falling into the very deep sleep of those exhausted by fear at her side, Kate stared at the clock, then up to the window that crowned the bed. Reaching up, she twitched the curtain over the last sliver of moonlight, and in the deep, warm blackness, slid into sleep.

xXx

Parting Comments: This was mostly inspired by the trailer for tonights episode, which scared the crap out of me. Plus Daniel and his thing with codes, I was thinking that if they lived together, if he wanted to talk to her without catching Lewicki's attention, he might tap out morse code. Those two things morphed themselves together in a nightmare two days ago, and from there comes the story.

Hugs and Kisses,

Eden


End file.
